Call it a micki

I’m sitting here with Tom Stites talking about wiki maintenance, and what a pain it is. And it occurs to me that what I want in a wiki is MORE, the ultimate outliner — a program I dearly loved from when it was ThinkTank all the way up until I finally gave up on Mac OS9/Classic, which was the last thing it ran on. Nearly all my writing was done in MORE, because it allowed me to organize and re-organized hierarchies of topics, quickly and easily. It also helped me think, which is what one should be doing when one is writing stuff.

Wikis are flat. All topics are at the same level. This is fine for an encyclopedia, but lousy for, say, projects. Joint efforts such as ProjectVRM are not flat. They have topics and subtopics. These change and move around, and this is where an outliner like MORE is so handy. With a few keystrokes you can move topics up and down levels, back and forth between higher-level headings… You can hoist any single topic up and work on that as if it were a top level. You can clone a topic or a piece of text and edit it in two places at once. I could go on, but trust me: it freaking rocked. There was no faster way to think or type. Hell, I’m typing this in one of its decendents: an OPML editor, also written by Dave Winer.

Anyway, just wanted to say, here in the midst of an unrelated local conversation, that wiki that works like MORE remains on the top of my software wish list for the world. Trust me: it would make the world a much more sensible place. And make both individual and group work a helluva lot easier.

12 comments

Since I have no way to see what MORE was really like, I’m not sure if this is anywhere near a good fit or not… but you might want to take a peek at WikidPad, which is Windows biased, but almost cross-platform (it’s possible to install on linux or mac) and open-source

Probably the easiest way to get started porting to Linux is to use the WINE libraries. People have had some success with quick two-hour builds. If you put a week or two into it, I bet the whole thing would port. I’m not a Linux programmer or else I’d do it myself. My C gears are so rusty I can’t even work on the Windows version. If someone resurrected THINK C then I’d be in business! 🙁

To Doc, I’m into taking a very long term view of this project. We have a very strong basis in content management and outlining and there’s a built-in web server, and good tools to connect to Apache and the XML-RPC connect to Python is very good. Lots of good places to pick up the project you want as a user, to create web editing nirvana for an outliner guy (like both of us).

Really? I distinctly remember dumping MORE the moment I started working with Aldus Persuasion. I could just seamlessly move from outline to thumbnail to single page views and shift points around — once I mastered Persuasion I was (pardon the sideways pun) the toast of the marketing department.